


Burning All the Bridges Now

by Atsadi



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aunt Peggy Carter, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Gen, Good Intentions, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Kid Tony Stark, Kidnapping, Physical Abuse, but still kidnapping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-15 19:02:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9251636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atsadi/pseuds/Atsadi
Summary: Ana Jarvis finally sees enough. She enlists Agent Carter's help and she is leaving with little Anthony tonight - with or without her husband.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Been considering this idea for a while, and then I read another fic in which Howard is openly, physically abusive of his son and nobody does anything, which... tipped me over the edge.
> 
>  **Note: The child abuse is off-screen, but I'm not exactly skirting around it either, so please be aware.** And if it seems a bit melodramatic, I'm sorry to say that tragic cases like this (and worse) still happen today right under the eyes of the authorities, and a few decades ago the idea of "the child is the parents' property" was far more prevalent. I know two people who fought for literally years to save _their own_ children and grandchildren from abusive parents using the court systems of the 70s. So this one hits pretty close to home.
> 
> (I haven't seen Agent Carter season 2, thus Ana's characterization is probably not compliant. Also I can't even deal with Peggy's marriage so let's say she keeps her maiden name professionally.)

It was becoming routine, this _anomaly_.

 _He had a hard day at the office_ , Maria had cried once - watching, one thin hand clutching the pendant around her neck, as Edwin did his best to physically contain his wife in the kitchen. Ana had snarled at Maria’s blasé tone, her careless words, and Edwin had had to take her face between his hands and remind her that it was not their business how their employer treated his son.

 _You know Anthony shouldn’t have backtalked like that…_ was a new favorite, now that Maria’s son was old enough to shout his opinions and, yes, talk back to both of his parents with gusto. (He had tried it once and only once with Ana: immediately subsiding when faced with her nonplussed expression.)

 _He won’t really hurt him… he wouldn’t_ really _hurt him_ … was the final excuse Ana would hear. This was the final platitude she would listen to from her employer’s wife, she who was sitting at the dining room table in an atrociously expensive white dress framed with strands of creamy pearls, her blonde hair painstakingly coiled and fixed in place at her crown, wearing the type of thousand-yard-stare Ana had seen before on survivors of war and torture.

Ana had made all the arguments, beseeched and pleaded. She had sent tips and reports. She had called upon Maria to protect her son time after time, demanded of Edwin that they call the federal authorities, since the locals thought it none of their business, then listened to his loyalty make excuses for Mr. Stark’s behavior. She had shouted and railed at her own husband over a child everyone refused to acknowledge was hers as much he was his mother’s and father’s. She stood with her arms folded in the doorway from the kitchen to the dining room, watching Maria staring blankly at the opposite wall. Her trembling hands were digging into the fabric at the sides of her plain navy dress. And Ana felt a rush of an oily, sickly emotion as she looked upon the woman she had once wished to call her friend. Her own child – her own son…

She was abruptly jerked back by a hand on her upper arm. Just before she could lash out at her attacker she was spun around, the door into the adjacent room was slammed closed, and she was confronted with her ashen-faced husband.

“Enough,” she hissed at him. “I have had enough of excuses.”

“Master Anthony is in bed,” Edwin told her instead, his voice hushed – but his expression said plenty. It told her that young Anthony had been down before he ever came within fifty feet of his bed. “He will be fine.”

“Do not lie to me, even if you must lie to yourself,” Ana snapped, snatching her hand from his placating grasp.

“No,” Edwin said, quietly. She felt his eyes follow her, as she crossed the room and began to prepare a bowl of warm water to go with the little box of medical supplies beneath the sink. “No, you are right. No more excuses. I will ring the authorities in the morning.”

“Howard has the police chief in his waistcoat pocket,” Ana said sharply, not turning from her task. The police knew. They knew. And Howard was so very valuable to the government, so much more valuable to them than one sweet young boy. “No, you had your chance. You have denied me mine for too long, but I will no longer stand by. I permitted my love for you to overshadow Anthony these five years—”

“Ana,” Edwin whispered, aghast. He was across the room in a few strides, but she wheeled around to glare at him. He stopped abruptly just within arm's reach, and she let him see her anger, see every last spark of her determination.

“You are the one who has made this a choice between your wife and your friend,” she said, and she knew it was unfair. She knew she was speaking from a place of fury and vindictiveness, but she was too afraid that if she let the cloud of resolve dissipate she would never retrieve it. That fear—that she would fall to weakness and fail Anthony one more time—strangled any desire to take a moment and breathe in some calm or kindness for her husband. “By dawn I will be gone. You can report me if you wish.”

“Ana,” he repeated, reaching out for her hand. She allowed him to take it – she had no desire to punish him, certainly not for his loyalty. But neither would she bow before it any longer. “Ana,” he said, lifting her hand to his chest. “They are his parents, Ana. We have no right.”

“If I had been asked,” Ana told him grimly. “I would have given anybody the right to save me.”

Edwin went even whiter, and clasped both of his hands around hers. “This is not that—”

“Not yet,” she retorted, staring him down.

He stayed silent, his jaw working frantically, and she quietly watched him. Her heart swayed out to him, but with the memory of Maria sitting like a corpse in the other room while her child… she pulled her soft heart back into order. This was neither the time nor the place for it. If nobody else would protect the boy, she had no other choice.

“You can report me if you wish,” she repeated in a whisper, leaning up to kiss his cheek. A noise was caught in his throat, one that may have been a sob or a protest, but he held it back. Ana left with the bowl of water, a clean dishtowel, and the tin with the red cross on its lid. She left Edwin standing in place. One arm was crossed over his chest and the other was pressed against his mouth, trembling in distress.

She tiptoed past the study door and its snoring occupant, down the hall to the west stairwell, rounded the landing, and eventually padded into Anthony’s room. The little boy was carefully tucked beneath the coverlet, so that only his riotous mess of hair was visible to her in the dark. She knelt at his bedside and gently touched her fingers to his face, not able to quash the urge. His skin was soft, his eyelashes inky against the pallor of his cheek and the darkness of the bruise spreading all around his eye. With swift, gentle motions she cleaned off the faint trickle of blood from the broken skin over his eyebrow, then pulled back the covers. He was dressed in his pajamas – had already been dressed in his pajamas when his mother had encouraged him to go downstairs and say goodnight to his father. Ana patted him down for anything broken that Edwin might have missed, and after finding nothing obvious she did a quick sweep for other injuries.

Anthony woke up when she had just finished checking his back, and was deftly buttoning his pajama shirt back up over the deep purple bruising already rising on his ribs. When he had been very small, he had curled up sometimes in her arms and inhaled the delicate, rosy scent of her perfume against her collar. When he was a little older he had told her she smelled nice, _safe_ , then struggled to say that she smelled like mama, but not _his_ mama. She had succumbed to a few sobs later that day in private, for what she had never had the opportunity to have – until she realized that the opportunity was right before her every day, with a smile to greet her and a laugh when they teased each other and a easiness in his limbs when she embraced him tightly.

Now she knew that it was not a bad thing that she did not remind him of his mother. Maria was either in her own bed by now, even at this early hour, or still sitting mummified in the dining room.

The little boy beneath her fingertips wriggled slightly, then slitted one large, dark eye open and half-focused on her. “’Na?” he mumbled, sleepy and sweet.

She kissed the tip of his nose in reply, which he immediately scrunched up as was habit. This pulled at the blackened skin around his eye, and he let out a little whimper and raised a hand to touch the split on the ridge of his brow. Ana caught his hand gently and tapped his pouty little chin with her pointer finger.

“Sleep, Tony,” she whispered.

“Hurts,” he whispered back, his voice cracking with honesty even though he was clearly trying to be brave.

She leaned over him and feathered her lips over his eyelid, well away from the worst of the damage. He closed his eyes in response, and tightened his hand in hers. She stayed with him until his hand went slack with sleep once more, then she stood and left the room soundlessly. Nobody was in her path as she returned the medical supplies to their places, nor when she returned to her and Edwin’s living quarters in the east wing. Wherever her husband had gotten off to after her ultimatum, it was not their apartments.

The phone rang five times in her ear before it was answered, which was the only sign that its owner had been asleep before answering the call.

“Carter,” the woman said in a clipped, clear voice.

“Peggy,” Ana said, feeling suddenly exhausted and desperate, all her earlier bravado and coldness disappearing beneath fear and anxiety.

“Ana, what’s the matter?” Peggy’s voice carried an undertone of alarm, and Ana could hear a slight rustling in the background, as if the other woman were getting dressed or rustling in her wardrobe. “Is it Jarvis?”

“No, Edwin is all right,” Ana reassured, though she imagined her half-frantic and tight voice was not terribly reassuring. “Peggy, I need your help with an… unsavory matter.”

The noises at the other end of the line paused, and when Peggy spoke again her voice was very carefully level. “Is this a matter for the police?” _Is this an illegally unsavory matter?_ Ana maintained her silence, giving Peggy all the answer she needed. Peggy sighed tightly upon understanding. “I have a matter of my own of some importance to handle in the morning. Is this urgent or can it wait?”

Ana flinched. “I am afraid it might be a question of life and death, Peggy.”

There was a brief silence, then the rustling from before resumed in earnest. “Give me half an hour.”

 

Ꮺ

 

Five hours more saw Ana Jarvis back in Anthony’s room in the dead of night, finagling the sleepy boy into an outfit she and Edwin had been saving for his next birthday. Casual pants like other boys wore, ones that did not need to be pressed and dry-cleaned, a shirt intended to get mussed, and a corduroy jacket without fancy lapels or a breast pocket. Once a pair of Ana’s socks were on his feet and both were stuffed into the canvas shoes they had intended to go with his new exploring outfit, Ana took the boy’s hand and led him from his room. He obeyed her instructions to remain quiet and stay by her side, but his tiredness—Ana hoped it was solely his tiredness at fault—made him clumsy, and she had to pick him up and carry him once they reached the stairs.

She found that once she had the boy in her arms she could not let him go, and so she continued to carry him through the tomb-silent house and out the back door. They skirted the outer wall of the mansion, and even despite his curiosity Anthony was fast asleep by the time Ana was walking through the outer gate into the driveway. The black car waiting for them opened its back door with the faintest of clicks, and Ana ducked inside.

There she found herself face-to-face with a stony Agent Carter in a brown pantsuit, sitting on the opposite bench with her back to the front of the car. Her eyes traveled over the sleeping five-year-old in Ana’s arms, the rapidly darkening bruise surrounding his eye, and her face only hardened further. Without a word, she handed over a binder held closed with a bulldog clip, which Ana cracked open while trying not to jog the child on her lap. A birth certificate was at the top, made out for _Antal Edvin Orso_. Her vision went a little sideways when she saw her maiden name there, following Anthony and her husband’s names in her mother tongue. She had not specified, so this must have been all Peggy’s idea - it had scarcely crossed her mind to change the boy’s name, with the state she was in by the time she was off the phone.

“Köszönöm,” she breathed, still staring at the name on the certificate.

“Don’t thank me,” Peggy replied. When Ana looked up at her in confusion, Peggy inclined her head pointedly at the file splayed on Ana’s knee.

Ana’s gaze roamed the rest of the certificate, noting that her new son had been born on May 1st 1970, to mother Ana Rebeka Orso, and father… she looked up at Peggy in surprise. Peggy’s serious eyes held a little light of mischief in them, and she reached over her shoulder to knock on the privacy divider of the S.H.I.E.L.D. armored sedan – which rolled down to reveal Ana’s husband, sitting calmly in the driver’s seat.

She held back a sob, though she felt tears gather in the corners of her eyes. “Edwin,” she said in crushing relief.

He cleared his throat and gave her an arch look over his shoulder. “That’s _Edvin_ to you, Mrs. Orso,” he told her, before letting slip a fond smile and turning around to shift the quietly idling car into gear.

Peggy was watching her sharply. “He knocked on my door ten minutes after you called,” she said calmly, and Ana pressed her hand over her mouth in inexpressible joy. In her arms, Anthony—Antal—made a sleepy little noise and burrowed deeper into her chest. She wrapped her arms around him and let the file of all their new, precious documents slip to the floor. The tension and desperation of waiting for her husband to return to her so she could apologize – for putting him in this position, for being so unkind to him in the kitchen, for not being able to change her mind… it slowly ebbed from her, and she felt herself sinking, exhausted, into the plush leather seat.

They escaped down 5th Avenue with little fanfare, and soon pulled up outside Peggy’s New York apartment. A nondescript gray Ford was waiting for them in the underground garage, and Edwin—Edvin—wordlessly heaved their suitcases, the ones Ana had been told not to pack, from the trunk of the sedan into that of the smaller car.

Ana stood by, clutching her charge, with Peggy standing to attention beside her. “Tóni,” she whispered, giving the boy a little nudge to wake up and say goodbye to Aunt Peggy. The agent who had helped found and now led one of the world’s foremost intelligence agencies, a woman whom Ana had once seen take a beast of a man down with nothing but her elbows and a button ripped off her blouse, leaned down to kiss the drowsy child curled against Ana's body on the top of his head. She stroked his dark hair back and softened for just a moment, then gave Ana a look that demanded her faith in them to protect her godson not prove in vain.

Then Peggy Carter vanished into the elevator. Ana, Edvin, and Tóni Orso of California never saw her again.

 

  
 

Ꮺ


End file.
